Building Your Perfect MBA Resume

﻿ When you are preparing your MBA resume you want to bear in mind that it is the first opportunity to develop your personal brand. This is what will tell the admissions committee exactly who you are and what you have accomplished in your life and career.

Applicants often try to squeeze too much into the resume or leave too many important bits out. So, let’s go through a few steps for how you can create that balance of being brief while also projecting a fully three-dimensional you.

The first step is to confine your resume to one page for each decade that you’ve worked. So, if you have worked for ten years or fewer, just keep it to one page. Use active verbs. The things in your career did not happen to you - you were actually the one who did the leading, navigating and engaging. Make sure that you use verbs that show exactly that. Focus on bullets that show your accomplishments and not just daily duties. In other words, examples like “I am responsible for writing these reports” do not impress the admissions’ committee. Instead, show the things you accomplished for your organization thanks to your presence.

Quantify as much as possible. If you could show the size of the budgets that you worked on, an x% of revenue, a y% decrease in cost, a z% increase in efficiency or anything like that, then it really helps to make the admissions’ committee appreciate the impact you made in the organization.

You also want to place your education section at the bottom of your resume because the longer you’ve been out of school, the less representative your school is of who you are today. So, start with your work experience and move down to education at the bottom. You definitely want to show your extracurricular activities. This helps to show that your life does not consist of just your daily duties and job experience, that you are a person who has interests outside the workplace.